Unforgetting Private Charles Smith

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Private Charles Smith had been dead for close to a century when Jonathan Hart discovered the soldier’s small diary in the Baldwin Collection at the Toronto Public Library. The diary’s first entry was marked 28 June 1915. After some research, Hart discovered that Charles Smith was an Anglo-Canadian, born in Kent, and that this diary was almost all that remained of this forgotten man, who like so many soldiers from ordinary families had lost his life in the First World War. In reading the diary, Hart discovered a voice full of life, and the presence of a rhythm, a cadence that urged him to bring forth the poetry in Smith’s words. Unforgetting Private Charles Smith is the poetic setting of the words in Smith’s diary, work undertaken by Hart with the intention of remembering Smith’s life rather than commemorating his death.

In Unforgetting Private Charles Smith, Jonathan Locke Hart has prepared a profoundly moving account of his search for one young Canadian soldier of the Great War who was killed in June 1916 and whose body was not recovered. What has survived is Smith’s short diary, and the story of its discovery in an archive is both chilling and exhilarating. Hart introduces his poem based on Smith’s diary by taking his readers into the archives with him so we can share in this ‘ritual of remembrance,’ read the young man’s attestation paper, follow Hart through the labyrinth of old files, faded photographs, card catalogues hidden away, and digital records. Hart also tells us that he copied, by hand, this diary and that in doing so he discovered the cadences and rhythms of Smith’s words: this too is a form of remembrance—visceral, intimate, poignant.

Sherrill Grace, OC, author of Landscapes of War and Memory

About the Author

Jonathan Locke Hart is a Canadian poet and professor. His recent work in comparative literature includes The Poetics of Otherness, a study of the literature of war.

Reviews

Succinct, compact, candid.

Black Warrior Review

Hart documents Private Smith’s diary in poetic style, stark and sad and funny, from his departure for the Western Front to the last entry on May 31, 1916: ‘Back at 11 am.’

Blacklock’s Reporter

Through Smith’s mundane descriptions of the weather and of daily life in the trenches, a remarkable, moving portrait emerges in tribute to the particular life of one ordinary soldier.

—Mariianne Mays Wiebe, Canada’s History

Table of Contents

1. Part I. Against Remembrance
2. Part II. The Diary of a Trench Soldier: A Poem in His Own Words

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